My travel season (the main portion at least) has finally ended.
The odd thing about travelling is that while the months seem to go extraordinarily quickly, they finish leaving you feeling as though you have lived 8 months.
That's actually a pretty fair assessment since you're (willingly) dragged from city to city to hotel to hotel to school to college fair to random restaurants and crappy fast food joints and awesome holes in the wall. Thousands of people, thousands of stories.
Then home, you hope, to breathe, breathe, breathe, but in reality it's to attend meetings, answer emails, answer the phone, facilitate preview weekends and tours and visits, drop by local schools on your list, eat food you froze knowing you weren't going to be home long enough to buy more groceries, see your housemates and workmates and "special friend", and go home to crash every night.
My schedule this year was pretty nice because I was basically on a week, "off" a week. However, since I have local schools, my weeks off were spent out of the office as well. At least I got to sleep in my own bed, though.
Another counselor was out of the office for nearly 6 weeks straight.
Even then, though, we have it so good. At fairs--which we love because we get to meet other counselors who understand the job and don't say things to us like, "Oh, your students see you as professionals? I thought you were, like, student buddies"--we talk with one another, and it always makes me cling so tightly to my school when I hear them talk of how they are set out on the road for 9-12 weeks at a time.
When we're on the road, it's hard to remember our office and real lives are still existing without us. We miss announcements, jokes, fun local events, birthdays, etc. What we gain is time with our applicants, our soon to be applicants, family members of our applicants and soon to be applicants.
We love it. I think the time that we realize just how much we missed home is when we turn the car toward the barn or when we get that first hug and can't seem to let our loved one go.
On the homefront, it's a season of deserts and floods.
You try to cram in all the love and snuggles (and emails) you can before you leave and in those intermediary pieces between trips, then spend all the time on the road subsisting on text messages, crappy internet connections, and promises.
Now I'm home. Time to settle back into routine as well as I can, buy some groceries, re-learn how to spend appropriate amounts of time with my friends (reassuring myself that I can see them again the next day), do my chores, and sleep.
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